A year on Ladybug Farm

Cici, Lindsay and Bridget are three friends whose husbands are gone and whose children have grown up. With the future open and nothing filling it, they decide they are tired of dreaming and never doing.

They leave their comfortable suburban lives and buy a run-down mansion in the Shenandoah Valley. They name it Ladybug Farm, hoping the name brings some luck.

The house is a huge restoration project, and trouble arrives steadily over the course of one year. Renegade sheep get loose, thieves raid the garden, and something that seems to be a ghost haunts the place. Each setback pushes the women to ask whether the move was a mistake.

This is women's fiction about friendship and starting over in midlife, set on a country property. The tone is light and comic, built from a run of mishaps, and the story follows the three women through the seasons of that first year on the farm.